PATRICK BATESON is Professor of Ethology (the biological study of behaviour) at Cambridge University, The Provost of King's College Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Biological Secretary of the Royal Society. He received a BA in Zoology and a PhD in Animal Behaviour from Cambridge University, held a Harkness Fellowship at Stanford University, and was Director of the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge for ten years. He is the coauthor with Paul Martin of Design for a Life: How Behavior and Personality Develop and Measuring Behaviour. He has also edited or co-edited several books, including Mate Choice, The Development and Integration of Behaviour, Behavioural Mechanisms in Evolutionary Perspective and the series Perspectives in Ethology.